Colosa Sweetens SugarCRM With 2 More Spoonfuls of BPM

After several months in beta, SugarCRM and Colosa have made generally available a new Sugar module that lets users design business process workflows inside SugarCRM.

The application, Colosa's flagship BPM and workflow suite called ProcessMaker, was
launched into beta
back in April, but the companies have added two new features and introduced a new pricing model since then, Colosa CEO Brian Reale told CRM Buyer.

"We got a lot of feedback from the Sugar ecosystem on how to improve it, and we put in place many of these suggestions," Reale said.

This final version includes a visual drag-and-drop BPMN 2.0 designer, a process engine and a business rules engine, all of which run inside SugarCRM. Users can use the platform to design workflows that control the way Sugar tasks get routed to different users, track how long these tasks take and control which Sugar screens get displayed and in what order during a workflow.

Two New Features

New since the beta version are an email template builder and a full business rules editor and engine, Reale said.

"Previously we thought we would rely on the Sugar template builder, but we decided to build in our own templates for email," he explained.

More significant, however, is the business rules editor and engine, he continued.

"It allows a designer to build a workflow so that it can run through a series of rules," he explained.

For an insurance company offering a quote to a person seeking a policy, for instance, "the workflow that would be built would deliver the quote based on the customer risk," Reale said. "So, if you are a male, 21 years old and have had five accidents, the rules engine would be calibrated to give that person a risk rating of 9 out of 10."

The engine then evaluates the end result to make sure it fits with the overall intent of the process.

"This adds a lot of additional power to the module," Reale noted.

New Pricing Model

There is also a new pricing model with this latest version of ProcessMaker. Besides the previous license available on a per-user basis, the company now also offers a per-transaction license for unlimited users, Reale said.

Other changes to the beta version included a spruced-up interface. The company is now working on rolling the platform out for all versions of SugarCRM. It does not yet work on Sugar OnDemand, but Reale expects to release a compatible version within the next 60 days.

For Sugar 7, he added, ProcessMaker should be available by the end of the year.

Erika Morphy has been writing about technology, finance and business issues for more than 20 years. She lives in Silver Spring, Md.